How Life Experiences Shape Your Sense of Humor

Almost all people come across humor at certain points in their lives, and, in experiencing it, amusement comes into play. While there are people who lack a sense of humor, the majority possess it and do not hesitate to smile or laugh when they find something comical. People with a sense of humor generally integrate into society better, as it is also considered a quality that makes an individual more companionable.

In my own case, a sense of humor developed from an early age, when my father would do just about anything to make me smile. One does not actually have to go through a great deal of trouble to get a child to smile, since children have a very well-developed sense of humor and will laugh at the slightest opportunity. My father, however, did some of the funniest things ever performed by a human being — and it did not matter whether you were 3 or 93, you would still have found the man amusing.

Today, I consider a sense of humor to be a genuine quality. When I describe another person, I place particular emphasis on whether or not he or she has a well-developed sense of humor. From personal experience, people with a sense of humor are capable of making others happy and of accepting a good joke when one is directed at them.

Until they reach a certain age, children tend to behave similarly regardless of gender, and situations involving humor can be equally appealing to both boys and girls. With the passing of years, however, differences emerge, making boys less interested in humor intended for girls and vice versa. Some motion pictures relating to misogyny, for example, are generally found humorous by men, while most women find them repulsive and inappropriate.

As individuals grow up, they find that their sense of humor changes and that things that were once funny have lost their appeal. Age has a strong influence on humor because mature people tend to better appreciate subtle comedy. When combined with cleverness, humor becomes something that most adults readily understand and welcome.

Humor changes depending on several intervening factors, such as environment, age, education, context, and many others. For instance, one can behave differently when the environment changes, and may find that an expression that did not seem funny when among family becomes funny when encountered among friends. According to B. Carbelo-Baquero, M. C. Alonso-Rodriguez, C. Valero-Garces, and James A. Thorson, "different elements of sense of humor might be more characteristic of particular groups."

While families and schools generally tend to discourage humor that involves vulgarity, groups of friends may be inclined to approve of and even encourage such humor. In more developed regions of the world, people have access to more information and receive better education. In contrast, people from less developed countries receive limited education, and those individuals have fewer opportunities to develop as intellectuals. Humor also depends on the region in which you live: while people from certain geographical areas consider a particular television show amusing, people from other areas might see nothing funny in that same program.

Humor is also known to depend on ethnicity. The English are commonly considered to have a peculiar sense of humor understood only by other English people, while Germans are stereotypically believed to have little or no humor at all. Of course, it would be pointless to actually guide oneself by such generalizations — there are certainly English people who lack a sense of humor just as there are funny Germans.

Beyond geography, the people with whom one interacts also exert a strong influence. If one lives in a somber environment where those around them consider humor unnecessary, that person is predisposed to lack a sense of humor in adult life. On the contrary, a person who grows up in an environment filled with humorous situations will most likely become an entertaining individual.

Considering that people of my generation watched a great deal of television during the 1990s, it would be entirely natural for those programs to have influenced our sensibilities. TV series such as Married with Children and Everybody Loves Raymond have shaped my sense of humor and made it what it is today. It is curious how the miserable lives of others and the mishaps they endure can seem so amusing to an audience. Even the media has come to the conclusion that humor sells and that people are drawn to it. From shows like these, I learned that humor is very important in our daily lives — that regardless of how much bad luck we encounter, it can all be improved with a small touch of comedy. Al Bundy is virtually a symbol of humor being fashioned out of the worst situations a person can experience.

My sense of humor as an adult has clearly been influenced by the various humorous — and not so humorous — situations I have encountered throughout my life. The fact that I was raised in a first-world country gave me the opportunity to receive a good education and to learn to distinguish between good and bad. I learned to differentiate between good humor and bad humor, filtering the information I received and retaining only what was worthwhile. I believe that children today receiving large amounts of information through various channels is not necessarily a positive development. Even when parents instruct their children to collect only valuable information, children still absorb harmful content because certain things simply cannot be filtered out.

As a consequence of receiving both good and bad information relating to humor, people sometimes make bad jokes or fail to understand innocent jokes directed at them. Over-sensitivity is something increasingly encountered today, with some people treating almost any attempt at humor as an offense. People working in comedy have observed that audiences and their sense of humor have changed over the years, and, in spite of the fact that "talk show hosts such as Jay Leno and David Letterman try to keep up the tradition," the public seems to be growing less and less receptive to humor.

My workplace is the perfect example of an environment that could not survive without humor. In my opinion, it would be virtually impossible for approximately a dozen people to work non-stop without a coffee break filled with laughter. Just last week I was about to lose my temper after making a mistake, certain that the manager was going to fire me. To my surprise, he walked right past me with his three-year-old child and asked whether I wanted to work in shifts with the kid. Of course, not every manager would be as good-natured — but considering the tension I felt as he was heading in my direction and the relief his joke created, I believe his humor was the best I had heard in years.